


Debut appearance

by Slant



Series: Townsville Futility [10]
Category: Sports - Fandom, Sports RPF
Genre: Deconstruction, Existentialism, Postmodernism, diversity and inclusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 07:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2723792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The "Meaningless gestures into the void" fan engagement program makes its first appearance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debut appearance

The Townsville Sports today announced that they would be making major changes to their fan engagement programs, starting with the controversial renaming of the club to the "Townsville Futility" and the club's stadium from "Sports' Town" to "the Meaningless Sequence of Unconnected Scenes That You Call Your Life". 

Explaining the change, the new creative team said, "The Meaningless Sequence of Unconnected Scenes That You Call Your Life hosts a maximum capacity of 4,000. This limit is imposed by so-called safety legislation, the even more risible concept of `property rights' and what social convention asserts is the `physical size of the grounds'. Terraces would be more space efficient, allowing larger numbers to individuals to be exposed to the series of meaningless grotesques that are termed `Sportsball'."

"Recent advances in crowd management make a mockery of claims that terraces are inherently unsafe, and yet the convention, devoid of truth in even a conventional sense, persists, and we are powerless to oppose it."

"Sportsball was, for a long time, the heart of a community, but the current situation has effectively priced attendance out of reach for most community members. As a fan-engagement program, we are to engage fans with the club's corporate identity, with an eye to providing them with sportsball-related goods and services, and yet only a tiny fraction of the fans may be present while the sportsing takes place. How then, is a fan engagement program to proceed? We shall leap, eyes wide open, into the Absurd."

"Sportsball is the Absurd: it defines a world, as meaningless and irrational as the one in which we must exist, and invites us to enter, willingly, into itself. What we find there is nothing that we did not bring with us. If the players appear to pursue some goal it does not mean that there is any external significance in that goal. If supporters find meaning in cheering than that meaning was created by them with an effort of will; it was not something that existed in the cheering." 

"All who know and love the sportsing know that it is an artificial contest, lacking any underlying purpose. Know that though we love to win, we love still more to feel that the struggle has meaning; know that it does not."

"The current situation forces those on lower incomes to come face to face with the Absurd in pubs or their own homes. These persons must struggle alone with the bitter fruits of self-knowledge, bereft of the support of their community. Distanced by circumstances from others that have experienced the same anguish, they must find their own answers to the problem of suicide." 

"This exclusion serves to produce and maintain a sense of alienation between the club and its local community. It is this alienation that we seek to embrace."

**Author's Note:**

> All-seater stadia were a legal requirement for all association football league games in England and Wales from 1989-1992, and remains a requirement for premiership matches. All-seater stadia were also a requirement for membership of the Scottish premiership from 1998-2011, and remain a requirement for European and international matches under UEFA and FIFA.
> 
> None of this would apply to a lower-division club playing a game that isn't soccer.


End file.
